Ray Hawthorne & Pete Zen Set Everything Ablaze On New Single ”Burn New Jersey Down”

Some places you love and hate in exactly the same breath, and New Jersey is that place for Ray Hawthorne. He’s not writing about somewhere he’s forgotten, he’s writing about somewhere that he can’t shake, and the hometown that raised him and would have kept him there if he’d have let it. This time, he’s not processing it alone, as longtime collaborator and producer Pete Zen steps out from behind the boards to share the weight of it. The push and pull is the whole point: wanting to go back, knowing you can’t and not being entirely sure which one hurts more. Ray Hawthorne somehow continues to tackle his worst moments to make songs that are impossible to not sing along to.

As always, Ray Hawthorne has thoughts. Many of them. Here are some:

“At this very moment my dog is playing with a toy made to look like VHS copy of The Muppet Christmas Carol. My wife got it for him last Christmas and miraculously it’s survived all this time. At the same time, the group chat in my small apartment building is being flooded by one person scolding a mystery tenant for attempting to open a door while the garage door was also open. I loathe this group chat. I dream of the day I can exit this group chat but I need to stay in it so I can be told when the water is going to be shut off for emergency plumbing issues. The dog toy squeaks. The group chat goes on. And here I sit, far away from New Jersey. I’ve built a life that I love so far away from where I grew up. Almost all of my friends are out here, I met my wife out here, got a dog, did a ton of drugs, stopped doing drugs, ran the LA marathon three years in a row, and then started making music with another fucking guy from New Jersey. New Jersey consumes me. New Jersey is a part of me that will never go away. Here I sit, waiting to go to a Los Angeles party on a fucking rooftop and some days I swear I’d throw it all away for a Wawa parking lot and a Ford Ranger.”

Longtime collaborator and producer, Pete Zen, who knows Ray Hawthorne better than most and still showed up anyway, adds:

“Burn New Jersey Down is a postcard of where we came from and why we had to leave. It’s built on very specific small details that don’t sound important until you’ve lived them, eating sandwiches off trash cans outside Wawa, bringing your girlfriend to the boardwalk knowing you’re going to have to fight someone who smacks her ass right in front of you, being pressured to going into the family business of either carrying Sheetrock or “waste management”, there’s really no in between.

Me and Ray realized pretty fast we grew up the same way. Tough love dads, no safety net, watching all our friends get wrapped up in addiction, but also feeling limited about our surroundings eventually leaving for LA and never wanting to go back.

We wrote it in about twenty minutes, because there was nothing to think about. It just came out. Every lyric was already baked into our DNA.

It sounds like a nostalgia song, but it’s more like a song where we put a pin in the past so we can accept that we miss our friends and family that are either stuck there or have passed away, but there’s a reason we left and why we’ll never go back.”

Renowned for his work in North Kingsley, the acclaimed project alongside Shavo Odadjian of System of a Down, Hawthorne initially captured hearts as the Heartbreak Hero with his inaugural solo release “Heartbreak Feels Good in a Place Like This”. Building on his solo work, his debut record “Ray Hawthorne Sucks” further cemented his status as a bold new voice in pop punk, quickly amassing a devoted following and over 20 million streams across all streaming platforms for his magnetic charm and razor-sharp wit.

Blending heartbreak, sarcasm, and just the right amount of emotional stability, Ray Hawthorne leads with a messy kind of hope, turning emotional freefall into something you can scream along to. Where debut album and his firstborn, “Ray Hawthorne Sucks”, leaned into an earnest DIY vulnerability, his latest record, “Ray Hawthorne Isn’t Real”, took a turn and tapped into the restless defiance of a secondborn. The 15 tracks helped embrace the chaos, laugh at the pain, and maybe, just maybe, allow us all to find a little redemption along the way.

Starting from the very real possibility that Ray Hawthorne is just a guy screaming into the ether (and somehow making it sound catchy), his catalog has become a refuge for anyone who’s ever felt too loud, too sensitive, or too much. Loud, petty, and deeply cathartic, Ray Hawthorne is proudly one of the most unapologetically honest voices modern pop-punk.

Be sure to stay tuned for more Ray Hawthorne news coming very soon.